I’ve always said it was different with her in ways I could not articulate. My third daughter, Eden, was born at term, healthy and weighing eight pounds. Within a week of her birth she was Failure to Thrive, seeing a doctor every day, a pall of mystery dangling over her head. Why was she sick? Why couldn’t we…

In 2012 we celebrated the first third birthday in our household where I was not pregnant with the next child. The following week, I bought the children butterfly larvae to hatch. After they flew away, I bought a plant, but it wasn’t very cute. Next came the chickens, and then the first baby bunny…

In the fifteen minutes since I told Mary and Karenna that they have both been invited to audition for a movie project they’ve hit all the important stuff: girlie squeal; panic that they’re not good enough; back to the girlie squeal; finalizing the layouts of their plush Burbank apartments. “So what happens if one of…

Oh. Hello, blog. I suppose apologies are in order. Excuses. Provisos, quid pro-quos, promises I don’t intend to keep … No, really, it’s been kind of a weird summer. Maybe if I had been blogging all along I would have a plan. Some back-up posts in the hopper. My blogging muscles all flexed and…

In the late spring, a squash plant popped out from among the leaves of the decorative green stuff planted in thick beds outside our front door. I have no idea what that green stuff is called — ground cover? Ornamental? Whatever, it was there when we got here and we don’t do anything to it.…

In the Target checkout line, I had a long, hard think. This does not often happen to me in Target, where my inner monologue tends to run like this: “Meow, meow, meow … holy-God-someone-shut-that-kid-up-no-you-shut-up-judgey-mcjudger-you-don’t-know-their-story-meow, meow, meow…” But as I watched the laundry detergent I had come for roll down the conveyer belt along with the…

I first noticed I was different in fourth grade. My parents said I was being dramatic. They said I just wanted attention. I thought they must be right. But still, I felt different. Maybe it’s true, I wasn’t trying hard enough. How could I not be able to do what everyone else was born doing? 100 years…